The Mountain in the Sea

I found this book a little slow going but ultimately was redeemed for me in the depth of research & thinking that the author put into understanding the foundations of language, intelligence & what it might be like to learn how to communicate with a wholly different type of intelligence than our own.

A couple of my favourites quotes (from fictitious authors) in the book;

> It is not just the symbols we use in our language that are arbitrary—it is what we choose to signify with them. We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place.
In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos.

> What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don't “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices